Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
ALAIN DE BOTTON